


Running of the Interns

by auroralynches (teresavampa)



Category: Guillotine Girls, Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Original Character(s), bi!Adam
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-28
Updated: 2015-06-28
Packaged: 2018-04-06 13:33:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,458
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4223571
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/teresavampa/pseuds/auroralynches
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Adam hadn't realized a political journalism internship would mean he'd have to spend a Friday morning in late June bracing himself to foot-race a bunch of strangers across the Supreme Court building. He definitely hadn't thought he'd wind up in a personal conversation with a French girl with no filter and a seemingly endless air supply. Sometimes he surprised himself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Running of the Interns

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by this post and its tags: http://pansexualparrish.tumblr.com/post/122563331636/claidilady-claidilady-running-of-the You should definitely read the whole post before reading the fic or you're probably not gonna understand what's going on. Liberties were definitely taken with how internships work--let's just say Adam met someone at one of Gansey's family parties who pulled some strings to let an undergrad who isn't a journalism major get a political journalism internship.

Adam sighed and tilted his head back, letting it lean against the hallway wall in a momentary rest to combat his omnipresent exhaustion. When he'd accepted it, this internship had seemed like a great idea--political journalism got him close to the courtrooms and political halls he hoped to work in someday, and it bolstered his resumé much more impressively than any of the part-time blue-collar jobs he'd held through high school and summers in college. But his full ride scholarship had allowed him to forget what it meant to be stretched to breaking, and now he was overworked in a way he hadn't been since he was 18, about to race halfway across the United States Supreme Court building, and desperately homesick. 

Ordinarily, he would have been back in Henrietta by this time of year, and the fact that he wasn't was subtly grating on him, like a shirt tag that refused to lay quite flat inside his collar. It wouldn't be entirely accurate to say Henrietta was his home; he still had too many terrible memories there to hold much affection for the town itself. The places he considered home just happened to be  _in_  Henrietta: 300 Fox Way, with its ever-changing bustle of women; Monmouth Manufacturing, which Gansey had decided not to sell after graduating Aglionby, ostensibly because the market wasn't favorable but actually because he and Blue wanted to live there together someday; and the Barns, perpetually full of cows and ravens and dogs and dreams and Ronan. Really, he reflected, it was not so much affection for the physical locations that made those places home, but rather the people they contained. Adam missed them all terribly, even Gwenllian, who had gotten over her initial dislike of him long ago but didn't let that stop her from yelling curses at him from the attic window whenever she saw him coming up the front walk.  _Four more days_ , he reminded himself. Four more days, and then June would be over, and his internship along with it, and he could go home and turn 21 and have a few more glorious months of magic and friends and boyfriend before being thrown back into the daily grind of undergrad.

With a small start, he jerked himself back to reality. Still no decision. One of the other interns had wandered over and leaned against the wall next to him, seemingly as tired as he was. When she saw his eyes open, she sent a small, wry smile in his direction, an acknowledgement of their mutual disinterest in being here. "Hey," she said in a faintly accented voice. "I'm Aimée." It was not Amy, or Emmy, but Eh-may, a curiously accented little thing, like the overly-sculpted, oppressively decorative frosting they always put on those uselessly tiny cupcakes at fancy parties. Adam liked her in spite of this.

"Adam. Parrish," he said, reflexively offering a handshake. He'd gotten good at shaking hands since he'd first started his crawl towards the upper crust as a teenager. His accent, no longer as carefully hidden, and spun-straw looks may have marked him as a poor Southern kid, but his handshake was the firm, confident grip of an old-money New England politician.

Aimée accepted delicately and added, "Bouchard. That's my last name. You--you said yours and it seemed fair, plus if I didn't I'd spend this whole conversation worrying, like, 'oh my God, does he think I'm being aloof or snobby or something because I didn't tell him my last name too', because people often think I'm snobby because of where I'm from, and it just would have been a whole mess. And now I'm rambling, God! I'm nervous about the run, and when I get nervous I talk. A lot. Seriously, you need to say something now or I'm never going to shut up."

Adam stared at her a moment while he processed the absolute avalanche of words she'd just launched at him, then decided to pick just one of her comments to respond to. "You said people think you're snobby because of where you're from. Where's that?"

"Paris, France. And London, England. And New York, New York." She sang the last part, a fragmentary Frank Sinatra. "And a handful of other places--I've been traveling for most of my life now. But I was born in Paris, and at the end of the day, it's my home," she said wistfully, her accent growing stronger as she spoke. Sure enough, she still retained a faint Parisian lilt, all shallow, forward letters and sharply accented syllables. For a moment, she simply stared into the middle distance, apparently lost in thought and homesickness as he had been moments earlier, before snapping back to reality and turning her attention to him once more. "What about you?" she asked. "Local kid?"

Adam hummed and tilted his head noncommittally, then admitted, "Semi-local. I'm from a town in southwest Virginia about 4 hours from here."

Aimée's eyes lit up. "By 'southwest Virginia', do you mean southwest- _Virginia_ , or south- _West_  Virginia?" she asked, emphasizing  _west_  and  _Virginia_  to differentiate between the two states. "My friend Sarah, she's from Riverton, near Spruce Knob. I lived there awhile when we were in high school."

"Oh, I'm not too far from there--Henrietta, Virginia," Adam said.

"Exciting place?" Aimée asked. She did not ask it the way people usually asked after other people's hometowns; she sounded genuinely interested.

Adam shrugged. "If you like ravens. And cows--my boyfriend lives on a farm outside of town." He paused, surprised he'd given that information away so easily. He rarely mentioned Ronan at all to people in D.C.--telling this girl within a few minutes of meeting her that he was bisexual and had a farm-dwelling boyfriend was so uncharacteristic he wondered briefly if some sort of magical possession was involved. But this girl didn't look or feel like any form of magic he'd encountered before. She simply seemed friendly and easy to talk to, much like how he'd quickly and easily fallen into a close friendship with Gansey within the course of a single car ride to Aglionby.

He became aware that she was speaking again; though she was standing on his right, he'd still somehow managed to completely miss whatever she'd been saying. The girl hadn't been kidding when she said she was a motormouth. "Sorry, what?" he asked.

"Oh, I was just wondering if you had any pictures--of him or the farm," Aimée clarified. "Sometimes people like to show pictures when they talk about things like that."

Adam did, in fact, have pictures. It had been with great reluctance that he'd purchased a cell phone before leaving for college. Gansey had refused to let him go to D.C. peacefully without some way of being reachable in an emergency, and so it had come down to buying a phone or waiting for Gansey to buy one for him. The former was slightly less humiliating. He deliberated a moment, then slid his phone out of his pocket and opened his photo album. "That's the Barns--"

"Gorgeous!"

"--and that's him," he concluded, tapping to the next picture, a rare image he'd snapped of Ronan standing in one of the lush pastures adjacent to the main farmhouse. It was one of the only images anyone owned of him smiling rather than glowering, and definitely the only one on Adam's phone that was appropriate to show to other people.

Her mouth opened slightly, and she angled her head sideways to get a better view. "Wow, really? He's hot! Good job, Parrish!" She paused, then grimaced. "Sorry, I didn't mean--you know, not that it's a  _surprise_ he's handsome--"

"It's fine, I know what you meant," Adam cut her off politely, figuring he'd otherwise be in for another babbling two-minute monologue trying to simultaneously clarify and apologize, most likely one with lots of detours and inlets and eddies as she got distracted by her own words. In truth, he was amused by this girl. Even more than before, she reminded him of Gansey, well-meaning but perpetually with her foot in her mouth. "What about you? Anyone waiting for you back in Paris-Riverton-New York?"

Aimée sucked in a breath through her teeth. "It's complicated," she said, and offered nothing more. Adam was about to ask her what that meant, but before he could, she glanced at the gap between the floor and the press room door and immediately straightened. "They're coming," she murmured, voice low enough that Adam could barely hear her. She looked up at him, her face still friendly, but also sternly competitive. "Best of luck, Parrish," she said with a nod.

He returned the gesture. "And to you, Bouchard."

The door opened.


End file.
